In proceedings IEEE International conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics "SMC'96", Beijing, China, Oct. 14-17, 1996.

This paper presents several extensions to a new evolutive prototyping process, called object-oriented mixed prototyping. Our application field is complex distributed systems modelled by the means of CO-OPN, a hierarchical algebraic Petri net language. CO-OPN being a strong synchronous language, we also show an original implementation scheme for its high-level communication model in heterogeneous wide-area networks. 1. INTRODUCTION The advantage of formal methods resides by definition in their unambiguous nature. This allows them to be supported by tools which automatically verify the properties, extract useful information or transform them into other representations. The benefits of formal specifications become even more evident when they can be used continuously through several stages of the software development cycle, like specification, implementation, integration or testing. Our purpose is to fill the gap that currently exists between the phase where a specification is simulated..